Gene Key 23 sits on the same numbering that Human Design and, before it, the I Ching use. It shares its number with Human Design Gate 23 ("Individual Assimilation"), carried over intact from that system rather than derived independently, and beneath both lies I Ching hexagram 23, Splitting Apart. Rudd retained from Human Design the sixty-four positions, their King Wen hexagram numbers, the arrangement of the hexagrams around a zodiacal wheel, and the pairing of each key with a "programming partner" opposite it on that wheel; he set aside the bodygraph, the types and the strategies, and added the Shadow-Gift-Siddhi spectrum. Three datable layers therefore stack here and are best kept distinct: an ancient hexagram, a 1987 Human Design gate, and a 2009 Gene Keys reading.
Richard Rudd's own reading of Gene Key 23 moves from the shadow of Complexity, insight so intricate that others cannot follow it, through the gift of Simplicity, the same insight reduced to its essential, communicable form, to the siddhi of Quintessence. Rudd connects the arc to the key's I Ching correspondent, Hexagram 23, Splitting Apart, whose received image of a mountain crumbling to a single remaining firm line he reads as complexity stripped away until only the essential remains.